Jerry Kirkpatrick's Blog, page 3

The Applied Science of Psychoanalytic Therapy

In my previous post, I discussed essential concepts of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis, that is, his basic science. This month I want to present the practice or applied science of psychoanalytic therapy. Engineers presuppose fundamental concepts of physics and chemistry, along with additional concepts unique to their specialty. Subsequently they apply all of this knowledge to

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The Basic Science of Psychoanalysis

“Basic sciences,” as I wrote in last month’s post, “are fundamental sciences, such as physics, biology, and psychology, on which applied sciences rest, such as, respectively, engineering, medicine, and psychotherapy.” Let me now summarize in brief the basic science of psychoanalysis. Freud says that human beings possess needs that give rise to drives, or urges to act, to satisfy those needs.

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Freud as Scientist

As I have written before (1, 2), the essence of science and scientific method is “conceptualization, the mental process of generalizing to identify universals and applying previously formed universals to understand particular cases.* The former is a process of induction and is called basic science, the latter a process of deduction (1, 2) and is called applied science. Most scientists

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Reading Freud: In General and in English Translation in Particular

Reading Sigmund Freud is a challenge, something I have been doing for several months. One reason is his approach to the science of psychology and a second is the English translations. Freud was trained as a medical doctor specializing in neurophysiology at the University of Vienna, though in his first year he attended the lectures of Aristotelian scholar Franz Brentano and was influenced by him.

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Freud on Neurosis and Psychotherapy as Illustrated in the Little Hans Case

The aim of psychotherapy, according to Sigmund Freud, is to make the unconscious conscious by uncovering repressed ideation, that is, ideas associated with the emotion of a triggering or traumatic event, and verbalizing the repressed ideas while also reexperiencing or reliving the emotions that were displaced to a symptom or symptoms. The process is called abreaction in the English translation.* 

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Two Kinds of Association in Our Conscious and Subconscious Minds

In my 2008 book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (86), I wrote: Freud was the first to identify that humans possess a dynamic, integrating subconscious, the activities of which he called primary process; he called the activities of the conscious mind secondary process. The subconscious is the portion of the mind that we are not aware of, so when asleep all activity of the mind is subconscious;

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Dreams and the Subconscious*

Aristotle said dreams, as paraphrased by Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, 36-37), are “mental activity of the sleeper in so far as he is asleep.” They are not supernatural messages from the gods.  Freud’s study of dreams said they are harmless hallucinations when asleep, unconscious urges expressed as a wish or urges from our “day’s residues” (waking life) expressed as a wish, or some

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Mises and Epistemology (part three of a three-part series) (Go to part one)(part two)

The human sciences aim to explain the causes of human motivation and behavior, healthy and effective, as well as harmful, and to guide humans in their choices and action to achieve chosen goals. This includes all applied human sciences whose aims are to get things done and done well. Economics is not just a highly deductive science, but also highly applied in that its aim is to define the

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Mises and Kant (part two of a three-part series) (Go to part one)(part three)

Aristotle’s categories, detailed in his work called The Categories, are fundamental concepts of reality, such as entity, quality, action, etc. Immanuel Kant, using some of those terms, describes categories as fundamental, innate concepts that prevent us from knowing true, noumenal reality. We can only know appearances, says Kant, called the phenomenal world. This creates the impossibility of

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Mises and Kant (part two of a three-part series) (Go to part one)

Aristotle’s categories, detailed in his work called The Categories, are fundamental concepts of reality, such as entity, quality, action, etc. Immanuel Kant, using some of those terms, describes categories as fundamental, innate concepts that prevent us from knowing true, noumenal reality. We can only know appearances, says Kant, called the phenomenal world. This creates the impossibility of

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